Page 6 of End of Days

She glared at me, made sure we were out of earshot, then said, “I only asked for one thing: a wedding ceremony. You can at least do that.”

“But we can’t evenhavea real ceremony because of the damn pandemic. Why don’t we wait six months? The vaccine is out, and this will all be a bad dream then.”

“I don’t want to wait. The only people I care about are here. Except for Shoshana and Aaron.”

She said that last part without any rancor, but while she didn’t show it, I knew she was upset. Shoshana was her maid of honor, and had promised to be here for the rehearsal. She was also an Israeli assassinwho was about two beers shy of a six-pack, but for some reason she and Jennifer had bonded.

I said, “They’ll be here. They promised. They’ve probably just had a plane delay or something.”

She looked a little wistful and said, “I can’t believe they didn’t come. After what we did for their wedding.”

I thought of my daydream and said, “Well, it might be for the best. If they’d shown up, you might have been throwing grenades attached to your skirt.”

She said, “What?”

“Nothing. Here comes Wolffe.”

George Wolffe was the commander of our little extralegal unit and while he was officially my boss, he was also a friend. In official top-secret traffic the command was called Project Prometheus, but since that was classified, we couldn’t run around saying the code name like we were the 82nd Airborne, so we just called it the Taskforce. He was invited to the wedding, but wasn’t actuallyinit like my team, so he didn’t really need to be at the rehearsal, but since things were quiet in DC, he’d decided to come down for a little rest and relaxation.

He kissed Jennifer on the cheek, saying, “You’re going to wear a dress for the ceremony, right, Koko?”

Jennifer was in jeans and a T-shirt for the rehearsal, her blond hair askew, looking like a surfer ready to go to hit the breakers on Folly Beach. She grimaced at his use of her callsign. She hated the name, and he knew it, using it solely to poke her a little bit.

She smiled and said, “That depends. You going to show up dressed for a wedding instead of like some billboard for 5-11 commando clothes? And why is your callsign the Wolf? Why do I get to be a gorilla?”

He smiled back and said, “A mystery for another time. I’ll nevertell.” He glanced around the setting, seeing majestic live oaks, a fountain, and an expanse of lawn surrounded by stately brick buildings. He said, “Pretty nice place for a wedding, though. How’d you get it?”

“It’s the school Amena goes to now. The place that convinced the Oversight Council to let her stay. They’re giving us a break on the rental cost because of COVID, but they’re still enforcing the crowd mandate.”

The Oversight Council was the board that controlled all Taskforce activity, and I’d pushed the limits of their approval to the breaking point with Amena, our little Syrian refugee project. They’d wanted to ship her ass back to Syria when they’d found out I’d smuggled her into the country using Taskforce assets, but had eventually agreed to let us sponsor her, provided we became a legitimate family.

Jennifer and I had hastily married with a justice of the peace, then enrolled Amena into Ashley Hall as a boarding student. Which brought us to the wedding ceremony being planned now. Jennifer couldn’t stand the justice of the peace thing. She wanted aceremony,and wasn’t willing to wait for the pandemic to subside to get it.

Wolffe said, “Well, I’m glad I made the cut line for the trip. I feel honored. I was hoping to see that crazy Israeli, though. Where’s she?”

Aaron and Shoshana had conducted more than one operation in support of the Taskforce, all off the books of even the Taskforce, and Wolffe respected her skill—even as he also knew she was a little... off.

Jennifer said, “I don’t know. She said she’d be here. I suppose I can switch out Amena for my maid of honor.”

That was probably a good trade in my mind. Amena was only fourteen, but she had seen enough of the world to give her the maturity of someone twice her age. And she wasn’t liable to strangle the preacher because she “saw something.”

But I knew that wasn’t what Jennifer wanted. I said, “The weddingisn’t for a week. We can always talk her through it on our own. She’ll be here.”

Jennifer was looking away from us, toward the back gate on Smith Street. Two people were talking to the security guard, trying to get in.

She broke into a radiant smile and said, “Speak of the devil.”

Chapter 5

Garrett shook himself awake like a dog wringing water off its body, the blackouts becoming something he was getting more comfortable with. After the killing, after the trauma, his brain would literally shut down, and he would collapse, catatonic. The first time it was scary. Now, with the third death, it was becoming routine.

He looked to his left and saw the dead prostitute. One more woman who didn’t want to connect, but he’d learned from the first one. Don’t use a blade. Too messy. It was just as easy to strangle the life out of them.

The first killing had been a disaster—the woman running around the small room with her hand clamped to her neck, the blood flowing like a water balloon squeezed by a child.

Make no mistake, it wasn’t the death that shocked him. He’d killed people before in the heat of combat, but never with a knife. Most had been with a bullet at a distance of eighty or a hundred meters. That killing had been another level of intensity entirely.

He looked at her dead eyes and thought,Why did you laugh? Why couldn’t you just give me what I paid for?

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